Implementing Modern Slavery Compliance in your Organisation

What should you be doing before you have to do it?

How can maturity be elevated and uplifted once it is mandatory?

Understanding “modern slavery”

Historically, slavery centered on the ownership of individuals. People as property, with no rights of their own.

By contrast, Modern Slavery is about controlling or restricting an individual’s freedoms to move and rights to choose.

The Walk Free Foundation describes it as:

“Essentially…. situations of exploitation that a person cannot refuse or leave because of threats, violence, coercion, or deception.

Modern slavery includes forced labour, forced or servile marriage, debt bondage, forced commercial sexual exploitation, human trafficking, slavery-like practices, and the sale and exploitation of children. In all its forms, it is the removal of a person’s freedom — their freedom to accept or refuse a job, their freedom to leave one employer for another, or their freedom to decide if, when, and whom to marry — in order to exploit them for personal or financial gain.” ¹

Walk-Free’s Global Slavery Index estimated there were 50 million globally in conditions of Modern Slavery in 2021, an increase of 10 million people since 2016.

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^{1 _{Global Slavery Index | Walk Free}}